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Flea Best Quotes

Michael Peter Balzary, better known by his stage name Flea, is an Australian-born American musician and actor. Enjoy Flea’s best quotes below.

“I don’t micromanage, but I do care deeply about every product we make. Every one goes through me, and I try most of our products before they go to market, including our John Paul Pet flea and tick shampoo. If I don’t like it, it’s not coming out.”

“I like my house to be unique to me. Sure, I’ve bought plenty of things out of a catalog, but the way I put them together in my home is special. You might have bought your sofa at a major home decorating store, but the rug you found at the flea market is so unique, it takes your room from ‘carbon copy’ to ‘simply yours’ in no time.”

“It’s an addiction. I love clothes. I like to go down Melrose and look in all the windows and I go to different flea markets. I have lots of costumes. You never know when you’re going to have to dress up like a milkmaid from the 1600s.”

“Non-crazy gun advocates – the ones who aren’t stockpiling in preparation for a zombie invasion – don’t like the idea of expanding background checks because they think it’ll be a lot more paperwork. And it probably would make it more difficult to sell guns at, say, a flea market.”

“My mother used to take me to flea markets in my stroller, and I would just rummage through the piles. You’ve got to dig through the overstuffed racks that everyone else just walks by. It’s the only way to find the cool stuff.”

“‘Priced to sell’ – just the phrase makes me smile. When a dealer says all the items in his booth are priced to sell, he means he’s tagged them as aggressively as he can to get you to buy them. Don’t worry, though, I still haggle. You have to. That’s the point of a flea market.”

“When I take on a design project, I have to jet from the bookstore to the hardware shop to the lamp store and back again just to collect a small portion of the many items I need to fill a home. But, when you hit the flea market, they’re all right there. From booth to booth, you have the bases covered.”

“I think when you get interested in antiques, the most frustrating thing is that books don’t have enough photos. When you go to a flea market or garage sale, you see lots of things you’ve never seen before and you have no idea what the price is going to be or should be.”

“My first collection was made from sheets that my grandmother, who lived in Normandy, had been collecting for a long time. There are a lot of flea markets in that part of France, and she knew what I liked.”

“You think 24-7 when you’re a creative person. And I find pleasure in everything – if I’m in a flea market, I’m there on my downtime, but I’m also there searching for the collection. I don’t separate the two.”

“I have an unusual hobby: I collect pictures of people I don’t know. It started when I was a kid growing up in South Florida, the land of junk stores, garage sales, and flea markets, as a kind of coping mechanism.”

“Some kids spent their allowance going to see ‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’; I spent mine on a great-looking lamp I’d found at the flea market and a ceramic bowl from a neighborhood garage sale.”

“I grew up listening to the Beatles and being an ardent Beatles fan when I was in third grade all the way to adulthood, and listening to all kinds of music that came to us either at the flea market or in our living rooms or on the ‘Ed Sullivan’ show – all these places we were influenced by.”

“My father had the bug. Ever since I can remember walking, he was waking me up at 5 in the morning to go to flea markets. As a kid, I couldn’t really stand it, but as I grew up, I became that guy, and when I have kids, I am going to be doing the same thing.”

“We do things on an exchange basis in the music business – it keeps the wheels turning. That’s how I can get people like Slash, Flea and Kris Kristofferson on my album. Collaboration should be done through trades rather than charging each other a fortune.”

“My grandmother was very fashion-forward and had these very structured, beautiful bags, and now, that’s why I have very expensive taste in bags. I grew up watching her carry these pieces of art. She could pair a Louis Vuitton with $10 jewelry from a flea market in Boca Raton, and everyone assumed her jewelry was expensive. I do that now, too!”

“I’m a vegetarian, and I long for people to eat less meat, but the thing to do is not to go, ‘Eat! Less! Meat!’ It’s to say, ‘I am fit as a flea and I’m 63, I haven’t eaten meat for 40 years, and I never get diseases, I’m never ill, and I’m full of energy. So how’s about that?’”

“I collect travel alarm clocks. I was in a flea market in France once, in 1994, and I opened up this beautiful Jaeger-LeCoultre folding eight-day winding clock folded into a beautiful case, and I went, ‘Wow, man.’ And I’ve been collecting travel alarm clocks since 1994.”